It’s sometimes hard to imagine or even quantify the specific SEO benefits of a business blog, but credit the gang at HubSpot for doing a good job of it. If you missed their blog post from a few weeks ago, I think these stats are worth sharing here:

A study of 2,168 HubSpot customers shows that businesses that published at least 5 blog articles in the last 7 days draw 6.9 times more organic search traffic and 1.12 times more referral traffic than those who don’t blog at all.

Here’s all that in a more visual piece of evidence:

You should click through to read the HubSpot post because they have additional stats showing how site traffic goes up the more blog posts you publish.

All of this is a nice complement to HubSpot’s earlier stats, which showed how companies that blog get more traffic, more inbound links, and have more pages indexed in search engines.

I agree that a blog adds to traffic and that multiple posts within a short-time frame also help. But for a one-person shop, it’s quite a trade off. If you post too much, your quality goes down and you appear less authoritative. If you post fewer, quality posts, you may appear more authoritative, but get less traffic. Search engines seem to be encouraging a lot of bland, repetitive posts that provide little value to the reader.

When we launched our new site, I used it as a bit of a testing ground for my SEO thoughts. I noticed a big jump in visitors and search listings when the blog was added around 4 weeks after the main site. Funnily enough, I posted about my experience of this a few days ago (not trying to get a link, so please just copy and paste into browser:

Interesting stats and worth delving into the research in more detail. I guess this is a simple correlation between content on a site and improving the chances of ranking across a wider range of search terms.